663,000 Jobs Lost in March; Unemployment at 8.5%

The recent, mild exuberance of the market, like the late hyper-exurberance of the market, may cause some of us, particularly if we have jobs, to forget that the interests of stock-jobbers are not necessarily those of ordinary Americans, and that the economy as experienced by them is still horrible. Today we learn that in March we lost 663,000 jobs, raising the national unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Owing to the ingenuity of federal accounting practices, which tend to ignore the discouraged or long-term unemployed, this is probably a little optimistic -- by one measure, it's more like 15.6 percent. In any event, there are jurisdictions where the numbers are even grimmer (El Centro, California's rate is over 24 percent) and the recession is now thought to have cost the country more than five million jobs.

Oh, and even if you have a job, expect your boss to be more of an asshole now, because he knows he can be.